Very long — some key bits here, the rest at the link. But it is Sunday, so enjoy!
[IsraelHayom] Within five hours, Dalia Ziada was forced to flee Egypt, leaving behind her family and homeland. The Arab street's response to Oct. 7 exposed a reality she had not wanted to believe, and when she spoke out against it, she became an enemy. In an interview with Israel Hayom, she says: "If I were an Israeli, I don't know how you can sleep at night."Within just five hours, Dalia Ziada managed to leave Egypt, abandoning her entire life and everyone she knew. In that brief span of time, she packed what she could, received help from friends in Israel and the US, and fled the country where she had been born, raised and educated, and where she had built a career and become a prominent public figure. It happened just two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre.
Until the final moment, she refused to believe she would have to flee. Ziada was already well acquainted with incitement campaigns, abuse and online threats. As an activist for liberal democracy, a fierce opponent of the Moslem Brüderbund and an outspoken supporter of Israel's right to exist, she had paid a public price for years. This time, however, another threshold had been crossed.
"It came to the point that they were using a verse from the Koran to justify my killing," she says. "A local group in my family's neighborhood went to my family's house looking for me. Thank God I was not there that night." At the same time, she says, lawyers affiliated with the Egyptian government began pursuing legal action against her on serious charges. "These two combined made me feel trapped," she says. "I could have ended up in jail waiting to be executed on treason accusations, or being immediately killed by some Salafists
...Salafists are ostentatiously devout Moslems who figure the ostentation of their piety gives them the right to tell others how to do it and to kill those who don't listen to them...
. And then the government would come out and say, 'Oh, we're sorry,' and that's it. It was a matter of life or death."
The trigger for all this, she says, was her public declaration that Hamas
..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,...
was a terrorist organization and that Israel, like any other country, had the right to defend itself. But that was only the beginning.
ONE AGAINST ALL
Ziada, 44, was born and raised in Egypt in a Moslem family. Her father, who died when she was 19, was drawn to Sufism, a more spiritual and moderate tradition within Islam. She describes him as a liberal, open-minded man who deeply influenced her worldview. After his death, in a conservative society where her mother was left alone with two teenage daughters, Ziada began wearing the hijab. She emphasizes that this was not a purely religious decision, but a response to social pressure and her mother's need to protect her and her sister. Over the years, the head covering became part of her identity, as well as the focus of an unresolved internal crisis.
She studied international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts and devoted her career to researching Middle East geopolitics, advancing democracy and working for regional peace. For her, "peace" was never limited to an agreement between Israel and the Arab world.
"By peace, I'm speaking not only about Arab-Israeli peace, but peace between all the factions of the Middle East," she says. "You have Moslems, Jews, Druze, Christians. You have people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, the Kurds and others, who have spent, I would say, thousands of years fighting with each other. My hope and my fight, and still my fight, is to get to a point where they understand that we are all human, regardless of where we belong. At the end of the day, we all want to live good lives. We all want to live in peace."
From that standpoint, she says, she had always supported Israel's right to exist. "This is unfortunately not very common among people with my background, Moslems, Arabs, Egyptians and so on," she says. "This caused me a lot of problems and a lot of trouble in the past, but it did not get to the point that it really threatened my life."
At the same time, she was waging an ideological campaign against the Moslem Brüderbund. In her view, the organization is not merely a political rival, but the bearer of an ideology that rejects the very principle of human equality. "The ideology of the Moslem Brüderbund removes this concept that all of us are human and equal," she says. "It tries to divide the world into Moslems, who are good and superior to everyone else, and non-Moslems, who should be submissive to Moslems. This is exactly the ideology of the Moslem Brüderbund, which is something I totally rejected as a Moslem myself."
Then came Oct. 7.
According to Ziada, she was one of only three people in all of Egypt who dared to say publicly that Hamas was a terrorist organization. The claim illustrates the extent of the isolation she felt. "We are speaking about the most populous country in the Middle East," she says. "We are over 110 million people now, maybe more. It is really dangerous to think that this massive population could be radicalized."
What shocked her was not only the terrorists' actions, but the response on the Arab street. "We saw how horrible it was, how brutal Hamas and its followers were toward Israelis, including innocent people who were literally in their pajamas in their own homes," she says. "Unfortunately, people in Egypt and in so many Arab countries were celebrating what happened as a victory."
She stresses that these were not merely members of the Moslem Brüderbund, Salafists or krazed killer activists. "They were mainstream Egyptians, people who look like me," she says. "So I had to speak up. I had to tell them exactly what happened on that day. It is not acceptable to celebrate such brutality. Then they turned against me."
According to Ziada, lawyers affiliated with the Egyptian government filed complaints accusing her of spying for Israel's Mosssd
...sees all, knows all, gets 'em all in the end...intelligence agency, committing high treason, threatening Egypt's national security and damaging the country's international reputation. At the same time, Salafist holy mans circulated a fatwa stating that if she was "an ally of the Jew," then she was like them and her blood was no longer sacred.
When she contacted a bigwig in the Egyptian security establishment and asked for protection, she expected that her public standing would at least ensure that her request was taken seriously. Instead, she says, she received the opposite response. "He was very aggressive with me," she says. "He said that I had made everyone angry and that I deserved what I got, simply because I said Hamas was a terrorist organization and Israel, like any other country, had the right to defend itself."
RETURNING TO LIFE
Even today, Ziada is not certain why the Egyptian government chose to act against her. At first, she thought the regime might have wanted to offer her up as a scapegoat to a public inflamed by support for Hamas. But the attacks did not stop. A few weeks before the interview, she says, a member of parliament close to the regime appeared on a prime-time television program, called her not only a "traitor" but also a "terrorist," and attacked her because of her outspoken opposition to Iran.
Ziada offers a complex explanation for the apparent contradiction between an Egyptian government that fights the Moslem Brüderbund and its hostility toward her. "The current leadership in Egypt, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and the military, are against the Moslem Brüderbund, of course," she says. "But why they are against the Moslem Brüderbund is a question we need to ask. They are not against the ideology of the Moslem Brüderbund per se. They are against the Moslem Brüderbund as a political entity that threatens their existence, threatens their throne. The Moslem Brüderbund is the only organized political group that can compete against the military."
When it comes to Israel, she argues, the ideological gap between the Egyptian military and the Moslem Brüderbund is far narrower. "The Moslem Brüderbund considers Israel pure evil," she says. "In the military ideology, until today, they still consider Israel our historical enemy, and it will always remain an enemy."
She says the peace agreement was perceived for years by many Egyptians not as true reconciliation between the two peoples, but as "a strategic agreement to stop war with Israel." "Even if on paper it is called a peace treaty, in real life, no, this is not how it was understood by Egyptians," she says.
DEEP-ROOTED HATRED
Following Oct. 7, Ziada reached an even harsher conclusion about Jew-hatred in the Arab and Moslem worlds. "Jew-hatred is so deeply ingrained in the Arab and Moslem identity, beyond what we can imagine," she says. "It is not really about one place, one war or one incident. It is not about Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
, as some people are saying right now."
According to Ziada, the public response to the massacre demonstrated that the problem runs deeper than a territorial conflict. "You can understand that a terrorist commits terrorism," she says. "But why would an ordinary person endorse this terrorism simply because it happened against Jewish people? Because the target was Jewish. This opened my eyes to a very shocking truth."
Ziada now works with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy and is pursuing a doctorate in antisemitism studies at Gratz College in Pennsylvania. "I am a Moslem myself. I am not a Jew," she says. "But I think it is the fight of anyone. It is not only the fight of the Jewish people. It is the fight of anyone who believes in human rights
...not to be confused with
individual rights,mind you...
and liberal values."
Ziada distinguishes between historical European antisemitism and what she describes as "Arab-Islamic antisemitism." The first, she says, was curbed to some extent through education, changes in public discourse and the lessons of history. The second, she argues, is rooted in religion, ideology and identity. "Today, to be a good Arab and a good Moslem, part of it is to be hateful toward the Jews," she says. "Someone like me, they come at me and say, 'You are not a Moslem. You are not an Arab.' Why? Because I love the Jews. Forget about love. Because I treat them as human beings, just like me, as they treat me as a human being. Just because of that, they consider me not a good Moslem, or not even a Moslem at all, not an Arab at all, or not an Egyptian at all."
She sees the new antisemitism in the West as an imported and adapted version of the same worldview. "What we are seeing now is like a Westernized version of Arab-Islamic antisemitism," she says. "It uses the same language, the same flags, the same symbols and the same everything I saw when I was a young student, a freshman in Cairo, during the Second Intifada. It is so much a déjà vu for me."